The morning after our Kiel biking we packed up yet again and took a train to Hamburg.
After watching inland Germany roll by our window, we entered the Hamburg metro area, and saw portions of the Elbe River (now knowing the Kiel Canal connected to it.)
We hung around the big-ass Hamburg train station neighborhood for a few hours until our friend Maggie arrived from Praha (Prague), having taken her own series of trains.
The three of us gleefully bought a “group” transit pass, and Maggie, the queen of public-transportation navigation, led us to our digs.
We knew from the AirBnB listing it was an very customized apartment, from all the correspondence I got from our “host,” it was clear they were detail-oriented, shall we say.
Nothing prepared us for the actual set up.
At a certain point during our first evening, I felt overwhelmed and creeped out by the combination of convoluted layout and overweight furniture and paintings I didn’t want to look at. Maggie pointed out that the whole set up was making us laugh together pretty much every time we tried to perform a normal task (cooking, sitting, etc.) and she was right. She also came up with The House of Escher; I elongated this to The Halls of the House of Escher.
Part of the sensory overload and disorientation came from the custom furniture, weighing in at hundreds of pounds per item.
We had a pretty great time knocking around Hamburg. Definitely a very wealthy city, lots and lots of low-key high-priced stores, excellent fresh food at steep prices, etc.
It took us most of our visit to figure out where we could buy FISH. Eventually we found a tiny restaurant opposite the wholesale fish dealers and had some of the best fish and chips any of us have had.
It made me happy to see a little push back to all the upscale ambiance
(Our boat tour of the Port of Hamburg gets its own TWO pages, because it was COLOSSAL.) I’ll load the links ASAP.